Salon Books: How …

Macromedia’s New Product: The worst-kept secret right now in the world of web design and production management is Macromedia’s supposedly super-secret project that everyone already seems to know about. Yesterday at Meet-the-Makers, I saw a live demo of this product and it looks very promising. My only major complaint is that you cannot easily use it with existing large sites that already have a template-based content management system. You also cannot import legacy Microsoft Word documents that have not been meta-tagged. It looks perfect for maintaining a small-to-medium sized Web site but is likely a nightmare to use for maintaining larger sites with lots of dynamic content and modular templates. It also seems silly that Macromedia is making anyone who sees a demo sign an NDA, since a lot of people already know about the product and even the news sites are writing about it now. I’m thinking that the NDA business is just another subtle marketing ploy.

I know that with time there will be conversion tools built that allows their new product to interface directly with some of the larger CMS solutions like Vignette, Interwoven and Documentum but there is little compatibility right out of the box. It’s mostly geared towards sites that have simple template structures and/or are static HTML or use Dreamweaver templates.

Downward Spiral: Now that the GOP has majority control over all three branches of the government, the next two years will be very interesting to watch. It is very likely the United States economy will continue in a downward spiral, and unemployment will continue to rise. Unhappy Americans will turn out in force in 2004 to erase the existing government from office. After all, the politicians in office right now can be held responsible (can’t blame it on bi-partisan bickering/stalling) for any major issues that arise between now and 2004 — the biggest one being foreign policy. It is clearly an issue that the Bush administration does not have a handle on, and likely never will — at least as long as it is driven by special interest needs like Big Oil. If there was ever a need for the emergence of a third political party (probably the Independent Party), 2004 is a prime year for it.